Paul McCarthy

About

Originally trained as a painter, Paul McCarthy currently uses video and sculpture as his primary mediums. Coming from the context of 1960s American ‘happenings’ and performance art, McCarthy’s work seeks to destroy boundaries of taste, tradition and public morality. In ‘Painter’ the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesquely parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. McCarthy said in a 1993 interview that his work came out of kids’ television in Los Angeles. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by turning it into an absurdist soap-opera.